First, if Cisco takes on PowerShell, that must say something about the cross-platform value in PowerShell as well as speaking to PowerShell’s potential to manage pretty much anything in your environment. That in itself is pretty cool news.

But second,it shows how versatile PowerShell can be. It’s taken 8 some odd years to get where we are now, but where we are now is that PowerShell provides a great extensibility platform. The UCS toolkit is based on using Cisco’s UCSM XML API for the communication between the UCSM instance and your windows system. The UCSM toolkit is then delivered as a small module you can import into your PowerShell session and away you go.

It’s cool to note that Cisco appears to have done their PowerShell support ‘right’. They’ve included help files, they are complying with the verb-noun naming, and the toolkit is built to work properly in the pipeline. Nice job Cisco!